Originally Posted by
dawg80
Just some website I Binged up. Whether the mark is $300K or $237K is irrelevant. The top 5% income earners pay 46% of the income tax. But, you are right, as has been demonstrated many times, smart people don't play the silly games of the tax-n-spend DC establishment.
Spending...
There's about $2.7 trillion in so-called "mandatory" spending and $1.3 trillion in "discretionary" spending.
Interestingly, the category of "Medicare & Health" appear in both....about 12% of discretionary and a whopping 43% of mandatory. The Military spending ALL appears under discretionary, about 55% of that portion. Funny thing as it regards the role of the federal government, the Constitution mandates "provide for the common (national) defense". The rest of the crap in the Federal budget has been put there due to politics and The Swamp creating relevancy for itself (for the most part).
The lion's share of mandatory spending, about 50%, is social security, unemployment & labor....whatever that actually means. So, 93% of the mandatory budget is Medicare, social security, and that labor stuff.
What is not shown, on this particular website, is interest on the national debt, which is running about 10% of the budget, approaching $400 billion annually. Actual number shown for 2018 is $384 billion. Have to figure it has, or soon will, top the $400 billion mark.
So....is it possible to raise taxes on the top 5%, or so, without impacting their economic/financial activity, and maybe generate an additional $400 billion to service the debt? Even if that happened (in a perfect world) we would still be digging a deeper hole with the annual $1 trillion deficit.
Okay...so let's raise income taxes on the other 95% of "income tax payers." After all, collectively, that 95% accounts for 54% of the revenue stream into the US Treasury. Can $500 billion be raised without impacting, too harshly, these taxpayers? If yes, then the other $500 billion can be saved via REAL spending cuts in the Federal Budget.
PLEASE NOTE: I said REAL cuts. Not the political games The Swamp plays by calling reductions in increases "cuts."
Where can we find $500 billion in REAL cuts in the Federal Budget? Anyone care to offer some suggestions?